Leonard Cohen he kept everything: letters to his mother, the wine list of the legendary Max’s Kansas City in New York, where one night he wrote a poem to a woman named Joan.

All these memories, along with photographs, watercolours, sketches, manuscripts, first editions of books (including his own) and digital drawings, flood the halls of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), in Toronto, in the first exhibition to present his archive Canadian poet and songwriter.

The material comes from two sources: the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, created to manage his archives, which include 243 notebooks and 8,000 photographs painstakingly collected over an entire of life.

However, behind all this rages a legal dispute over the songwriter’s fortune. Seven years after his death in 2016, his children will find themselves in courtrooms with their father’s manager. Born in Montreal in 1934, Cohen hired Corey after the scandalous firing of his previous manager, which saw $5 million of Cohen’s retirement savings disappear while the singer was living in a Buddhist monastery in California.

The battle over Cohen’s estate is now being fought in a Los Angeles court, where the musician died and where his children, the ultimate beneficiaries of the trust, live. In March of last year, they filed a lawsuit over the property, which is valued at $48 million (just over €45 million), according to one of the court documents reviewed by “EL PAÍS.”

In the lawsuit, Cohen’s children express concern about Corey’s unlimited control over the late singer’s estate, citing a lack of transparency, which led to months of negotiations to revise the terms of the deal.

According to the plaintiffs, Corey promised to keep them informed of his dealings and to seek their input before making decisions, but it took only a few weeks for him to break that agreement by signing the contract to stage the exhibition at the Toronto museum and publishing an unpublished unfinished novel!

Cohen’s catalog of songs sold for $58 million (€54.5 million), of which Corey took a 15% commission. The lawsuit alleges that Cohen signed this agreement when he was dying and heavily medicated.